A summary of The State of Australian Cities 2011 – part 1

On October 20, the Major Cities Unit of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport released a report called The State of Australian Cities 2011, which is a follow-on from the report with the same name released in 2010. It highlights some interesting growth and migration trends between Australia’s 18 major cities – defined as urban areas containing over 100000 people.

For those who don’t want to trawl through over 250 pages worth of reading, here are some of the interesting comparisons within the report.

How large are Australia’s biggest cities?

Australia has five major cities with populations of over 1 million people. They are Sydney (4.58 million), Melbourne (4.08 million), Brisbane (2.04 million), Perth (1.7 million) and Adelaide (1.2 million).

Other cities with over half a million people include the Gold Coast region and Newcastle. Australia’s biggest capital city – Sydney – has over 35 times as many people as Australia’s smallest capital city – Darwin.

Which cities are growing fastest?

The answer may surprise a few people. The fastest growing city in Australia in terms of people added is Melbourne, which added over 600000 in the decade to 2010. This compares with 450000 people added in Sydney.

In terms of growth rate, Perth is the fastest growing major city with an annual population growth of 2.2% per year in the same decade. Brisbane is the next fastest growing at 1.9% while Adelaide has a lower growth rate at 1.3%.

The four largest cities in Australia – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth – accounted for over 60% of the population growth in the decade, which highlights how important the major cities to Australia’s prosperity.

How far people live from the CBDs

Sydney has relatively even proportions of its population living at various distances from its CBD with many people living over 50 km from the heart of Sydney. Melbourne on the other hand has greater proportions of its population living in the more middle distance areas (5-30km away) and fewer living closer or further away. The trend observed in Melbourne is even more pronounced in Perth, where greater proportions live 5-30km from the Perth CBD and very few live more than 50 kilometres away.

Where the growth is occurring within the cities

In most Australian cities, the majority of the population growth has been accommodated on the urban fringes of our cities with greenfield development dominating the numbers in most places – Sydney being the notable exception.

Sydney has a greater proportion of its population accommodated within its existing urban footprint, with 20.5% moving to Sydney’s inner suburbs compared with 12.2% and 13% in Melbourne and Perth respectively. All of Australia’s five major cities have noted significant population growth near their city centres coming off a low base. This is a reversal of a trend that took place in the 1950s and 1960s that saw once high population numbers near the city centres fall as residents moved out into the suburbs – when the Great Australian Dream was well and truly alive.

In each of the three cities mentioned above, the outer suburbs still saw the majority of the population growth, with Melbourne and Perth have higher proportions of population growth in these areas than Sydney. This is reflected in some of the publicly discussed issues in each city, with Sydney media commonly referring to overcrowding in the city while Melbourne media often talk about Melbourne’s out of control urban sprawl.

Migration to and from the cities

Although Sydney is growing, there are more interstate and intrastate departures from Sydney than there are arrivals. Some suspect high property prices and congestion in Australia’s biggest city is driving people away. However, Sydney isn’t the only place with these problems and yet the same pattern of departures and arrivals is not observed in other states.

So how is Sydney growing then? The departures are more than made up by the number of international migrants moving to Sydney, with most international arrivals occurring through Sydney and Melbourne. Between 2001 and 2006, Sydney had 243000 departures with 366000 arrivals.

What’s interesting to note is where many migrants move when they arrive. Many international migrants eventually leave Sydney and Melbourne, bound for the third and fourth biggest cities where there are plentiful employment prospects – Brisbane and Perth.